The New ADAAA

In case you missed it, an important event occurred in late September that will substantially benefit individuals with disabilities.

On Sept. 25, President Bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Amendments Act of 2008 (its acronym is ADAAA). This law builds on the original ADA enacted in 1990, and will protect people with disabilities and provide a clearer definition of disability for employers.

Under the new law, the term "disability" is defined to mean, with respect to an individual, "(a) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual; (b) a record of such an impairment; or "(c) being regarded as having such an impairment. The law further defines "major life activities," and "regarded as having such an impairment."

The goal of the original ADA was to create a civil rights law protecting people with disabilities from discrimination on the basis of their disabilities. Disability rights advocates were victorious in their efforts to open doors for people with disabilities and to change the country's outlook and acceptance of people with disabilities. These advocates believed that the terms of the ADA, combined with the legislative history of the ADA, would provide clear instructions to the courts for broad coverage prohibiting discrimination against people with a wide range of physical and mental impairments.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court barricaded the door that the ADA had opened by interpreting the definition of "disability" in the ADA to create an overly demanding standard for coverage under the law, and lower courts followed its lead.

Following passage of the ADA, the Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued implementing regulations within a year of the law's passage. The DOJ regulations with regard to the definition of disability largely paralleled the existing regulations implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and did not greatly expand on that definition.

By contrast, the regulations issued by the EEOC went into great detail about definition of disability. Both in regulations, and in accompanying guidance, the EEOC extensively defined the term "substantially limits" and introduced a completely new and complex analysis for impairments that might limit only the major life activity of "working."